Tag: Artificial Intelligence

A Trio of Tech Takedowns

By

NewCo Daily July 17, 2017

Watson Slapped, Is Content King?, and a Call for Antitrust from…the Journal?

Welcome back to the Daily. We’re back to our Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule, but absent our fearless writer, Scott Rosenberg, who’s moved on to a publication we all love, Backchannel. I’ll be writing the Daily for now, please be gentle with me, as Scott’s prose is hard to match. But for today, enjoy what seems to be a building narrative: the role of tech in society is getting a bit too big for its own britches.


It Ain’t Elementary, Watson

IBM’s stock suffered a high profile downgrade late last week, thanks to an analyst report which essentially called bullshit on Watson, IBM’s high-profile “AI as a service” unit. The report, from investment bank Jeffries, used the failure of a cancer diagnosis project at M.D. Anderson as a jumping off point to conclude that IBM’s significant investments in Watson would fail to return shareholder equity anytime soon. Jeffries also pulled data from major jobs posting sites that showed IBM to be far behind Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft when it comes to attracting AI-related talent. That’s a problem for a company that has made Watson the center of its public brand (you did see the ads with Bob Dylan and Serena Williams, right?).

Read More

The Future of Augmented Reality Ain’t Pokemon Go

By

“After On:” Audio Episode 1 of 8

Meta’s Meron Gribetz on the present & future of AR

Five years back, Google Glass’s famous launch video trained us to think of augmented reality as a flat translucence. It would be a bunch of wee announcements slapped on our field of view like Post-Its on ski goggles. The world beheld this daring vision and hit the snooze bar. AR’s next major milestone, Pokémon Go, is also all about simple superimposition (for now, anyway). So I was surprised to find the faithful at last month’s AR in Action conference almost wholly focused on holograms and photorealism. It’s a big step forward — and it’s actually starting to work.

I attended the New York City event to meet up with Meta CEO Meron Gribetz. Meta is racing Microsoft for the early lead in commercial AR. Florida-based Magic Leap is also allegedly in the hunt, having raised over a billion dollars. But having yet to ship a product, they came in for some sharp criticism back in December, followed by bemused head-scratching, which continues to this day.

Subsequent to the conference, I sat down with Meron in Meta’s Silicon Valley HQ to record a long interview — which now is part of an eight-episode audio series I’m producing to accompany my new novel, After On. I set the novel nine seconds into the future, as this let me feature all kinds of present-tense science and technology. I figured this would also let me stuff my book full of 20-page digressions on how cooooool AR, synthetic biology, quantum computing, and other fields are (or rather, will be. You know — nine seconds from now).

Read More

Write for 7,500 Hours, Then Hit Post

By

The Novel In The Digital Age

Why I’m Betting on Medium

Readers and authors deserve a great place to congregate online. Sure, the written word has many homes. But most fit poorly with the cadence of books. Authors write extremely long dispatches — so we’re mostly bad at Twitter. Facebook basically charges us to reach the readers who proactively seek us out and follow us, which is kind of evil (plus, we’re cheapskates). I love Goodreads and recommend it to everyone. But as its name avows, it’s geared more around readers than authors.

As for blogging, it’s more like an alternative to our main gig than a means to support it. Blog daily, and you’ll have no time to write books. Blog quarterly, and nobody — literally, nobody — will keep checking in to see if you have a pulse. Independent and emerging writers have many direct routes to readers (I’m especially enamored with WattPad). But publishers keep most of their output away from those channels. And so authors who work with publishers are still seeking a place to truly showcase our work and gather a following.

I think that place can be Medium.

Read More

In An AI World, Work Changes Radically, and Government Takes the Lead

By

The NewCo Daily: Today’s Top Stories

Reizigerin| Flickr

We shouldn’t be worried about artificial intelligence turning into our new robotic overlords, but that doesn’t mean we should stop worrying about AI, writes Kai-Fu Lee, the Microsoft and Google veteran who helped invent the field of speech recognition and is now a leading investor and voice on the Chinese internet. Writing in The New York Times, Lee argues that our global economy is about to be more deeply disrupted than we have been willing to imagine, as AI draws tight new boundaries around the employment opportunities for humans.

In the continuing debate on whether AI will eliminate tons of jobs or just revamp them, mark Lee down as a strong eliminationist. He foresees “a wide-scale decimation of jobs,” along with an unprecedented flow of profit and wealth to the companies that introduce the new technology.

Read More

Is Artificial Intelligence Really the Next Technological Revolution?

By

A comparison of AI with previous technological breakthroughs

Source: digicortex/YouTube

There’s no shortage of hype around artificial intelligence. Fueled by recent scientific advances in the field, AI is now characterized as the “new electricity”—a technological breakthrough that will revolutionize the world.

But are we sure that’s the case?

Read More

There Is One Thing Computers Will Never Beat Us At

By


In late post-revolutionary France one man was tasked to map out the country. Gaspard de Prony, a mathematician and engineer, decided to approach the task by creating logarithmic and trigonometric tables. These tables, which would come to be known as Tables of de Prony, were destined to speed up the trigonometric calculations needed to complete these cartographic task.


Read More

The Urgency of Cognitive Improvement

By

I recently gave a talk at the reCode conference titled “What If: The Next Frontier of Human Aspiration.” Focusing on the brain warrants the focus of the greatest minds of our generation — and now. Here, I want to expand upon those ideas.


Over the past several months, I have hosted twelve intimate dinners with some of the smartest people I know. At the beginning of each of these dinners, I would initiate a thought experiment:

What do we need to focus on today in order to create a world that we would love to live in by 2050?

Read More

How Might AI Benefit Humanity?

By

NewCo Shift Forum

Four AI veterans discuss the implications of strong AI in society

Left to right: Azeem Azhar, Vivek Wadhwa, Francesca Rossi, and Shivon Zilis

As the introduction below makes clear, the Shift Forum’s AI panel was unique — our moderator, Azeem Azhar, could not make it to San Francisco because of Trump’s travel ban. Nevertheless, we brought Azhar in via video (which cannot be seen in the video capture, alas). Below is the edited transcript of the conversation between Azhar, who runs the popular Exponential View newsletter, Shivon Zilis, of Bloomberg Beta, Vivek Wadhwa of Carnegie Mellon, and Francesca Rossi of IBM.

John Battelle: I’m not often say that I’m excited that one of our speakers couldn’t make it, but I kind of am — because he’s going to be here, sitting in this chair as a video avatar. The moderator of the panel, Azeem Azhar, is a London-based Pakistani man, who is also a father. He called me a few days ago and said, “I don’t really think I can travel to the United States right now. I’ve been stopped at the border many times already but I’m concerned that even if I get in, I won’t be able to get back.” This was when there were protests going on at airports.

Read More

How Machine Learning Can Drive Retail Sales

By


In this post, ELEKS’ head of omnichannel solutions Pavlo Khliust explores how retail is using machine learning, artificial intelligence and other developments to drive sales.

As the shopping experience becomes more and more integrated, retailers tend to adopt an omnichannel sales approach. This means that a customer may seamlessly switch across the multitude of sales channels, shopping online from a desktop or mobile device, by telephone or in a bricks and mortar stores.


Sales Ex Machina

Read More

The Iron Grip of Facebook’s Tentacles

By


Facebook’s power is portrayed in this one graph. Vladan Joler, leading the research, reveals the common denominator that drives the company’s momentum — the user:

All of us, when we are uploading something, when we are tagging people, when we are commenting, we are basically working for Facebook.

Read More